Facebook adds Twitter-style hashtags for topics

Facebook on Wednesday added Twitter-style hashtags to help the more than one billion members of the social network tune into topics of interest at the leading social network.

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“To date, there has not been a simple way to see the larger view of what’s happening or what people are talking about,” Facebook product manager Greg Lindley said in a blog post.

“Similar to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pinterest, hashtags on Facebook allow you to add context to a post or indicate that it is part of a larger discussion.”

Twitter made the ‘#’ symbol part of Internet Age culture by letting users of the globally popular one-to-many text messaging service label comments with terse topic descriptions marked with the punctuation mark.

Facebook users can search the service based on hashtags or click on a hashtag to get a list of posts people have put in the category, according to Lindley.

“Hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations,” Lindley said.

“We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months.”